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Adapted from Sen. Joe Lieberman’s speech last Thursday at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

BETWEEN 2002 and 2006, there was a bat tle within the Demo cratic Party – a battle I was part of. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework that President Bush articulated for the War on Terror as our own – because it was our own. It was our legacy from [Presidents] Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Clinton.

We could rightly criticize the Bush administration when it failed to live up to its own rhetoric or when it bungled the execution of its policies. But I felt that we should not minimize the seriousness of the threat from Islamist extremism or the fundamental rightness of the muscular, internationalist and morally self-confident response that Bush had chosen in response to it.

But that wasn’t the choice most Democrats made.

Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign-policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the War on Terror or to strengthen our democracy-promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there and to hand a defeat to President Bush.

Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America’s moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran . . .

Even as evidence has mounted that Gen. David Petraeus’ new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving . . .

For many Democrats, the guiding conviction in foreign policy isn’t pacifism or isolationism – it is distrust and disdain of Republicans in general and President Bush in particular . . .

To illustrate my point, I want to talk about a controversy in the Democratic presidential primaries, in which I have played an unintended part.

I offered an amendment earlier this fall, together with Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, urging the Bush administration to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization and impose economic sanctions on them.

The reason for our amendment was clear. In September, Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before Congress about the proxy war that Iran – and in particular, the IRGC and its Quds Force subsidiary – has been waging against our troops in Iraq. Petraeus told us that the IRGC Quds Force has been training, funding, equipping, arming and, in some cases, directing Shiite extremists who are responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers . . .

Whatever the differences on foreign policy or even on Iran, I assumed that tougher, targeted economic sanctions against the IRGC were something that we could all agree on.

I was wrong.

Although the Senate passed our amendment, 76-22, several Democrats, including some of the presidential candidates, soon began attacking it – and Sen. Clinton, who voted for the amendment. In fact, some of the very same Democrats who had cosponsored the legislation in the spring, urging the designation of the IRGC, began denouncing our amendment for doing the exact same thing . . .

I asked some of my Senate colleagues who voted against our amendment: “Do you believe the evidence the military has given us about the IRGC sponsoring these attacks on our troops?” Yes, they said. “Don’t you support tougher economic sanctions against Iran?” I asked. Again, yes – no question.

So what’s the problem? I asked.

“It’s simple,” they said. “We don’t trust Bush. He’ll use this resolution as an excuse for war against Iran” . . .

There is something profoundly wrong – something that should trouble all of us – when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.

There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyperpartisan sentiment in the Democratic base – even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.

For me, this episode reinforces how far the Democratic Party has strayed . . .

That is why I call myself an Independent Democrat today. It is because my foreign-policy convictions are the convictions that have traditionally animated the Democratic Party – but they exist in me today independent of the Democratic Party, which has largely repudiated them.

I hope that Democrats will one day again rediscover and re-embrace these principles, which were at the heart of our party as recently as 2000. But regardless of when or if that happens, those convictions will continue to be mine. I will fight to advance them, along with like-minded Democrats and like-minded Republicans.